How much does place matter?

Transcription

1 Environment and Planning A 2001, volume 33, pages 1335 ^ 1369 DOI: /a34104 How much does place matter? Danny Dorling 1335 George Smith, Michael Noble, Gemma Wright 1341 Roger Burrows, Jonathan Bradshaw 1345 Heather Joshi 1349 Charles Pattie 1353 Richard Mitchell 1357 Anne E Green 1361 Andrew McCulloch 1365 Anecdote is the singular of data Danny Dorling School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, England; Received 21 May 2001 ``Everything is real estate. You're a product of your geography.'' (1) Why put together yet another debate about the importance or irrelevance of place in society? The superficial reason for doing this here was that in Autumn 2000 I was asked to referee a paper by Andrew McCulloch (2001) which both impressed and concerned me. I was impressed by the amount of work and skill which had gone into this paper, as with much of the analysis of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) coming out of Essex University. I was also concerned with some of the underlying assumptions and implicit beliefs expressed through this and in similar recent papers using the BHPS. The six short articles which follow and McCulloch's reply reflect much of the admiration for his work and skill, a great deal of support but also much dissent. I summarise them next; however, they are all kept short enough to be summaries of a much wider debate in themselves. The authors were chosen as being leading researchers in social science, ranging from the study of deprivation and poverty, to employment, housing, voting, area effects, health, multilevel modeling, and other similar subjects and techniques. They were limited (as am I) to only a few words and half a dozen references. Among a number of the critics, the paper raised the issue of whether area-based initiatives are a valid policy option for government today. George Smith, Michael Noble, and Gemma Wright suggest that McCulloch is on shaky ground in arguing against area-based policy initiatives; in contrast to his claims they suggest that we do need such policies and that we do not need further evidence that area effects exist to justify area-based initiatives. In further contrast, Roger Burrows and Johnathan Bradshaw argue that there is little evidence that area-based policies alleviate poverty. However, they too believe there is not enough `evidence' in McCulloch's paper to support his general conclusionsöwith which they sympathise. Both of the above papers argue for longitudinal studies. Heather Joshi, a long-term advocate and (1) Thanks to Nick Phelps for this. Source: Lenny Bruce, comedian character, in Don DeLillo's Underworld, (1998, page 544). Ànecdote is the singular of data' came from an forwarded to me by Charles Pattie.

2 1336 D Dorling researcher of longitudinal data, is largely supportive of McCulloch's findings, but still believes there may be a place for policies towards places, as long as they operate within a context of policies towards people. Charles Pattie argues that McCulloch has many good points to make, but that we should not underestimate the political symbolism of area-based policies. He also points out some subtle inconsistencies in the logic of McCulloch's modelingöin short that it ignores the possible past influence of contextual effects, using the past to `control' out context. Burrows, Bradshaw, and Pattie all call for a longer historical perspective in general, as well as in the actual modeling (in Pattie's case). The following contribution, from Richard Mitchell, partly provides this, as well as a strong critique of the kinds of multilevel modeling approaches McCulloch uses, from someone who has also used them for his own research. Self critiques are often the strongest kindöas we tend to know many of our own weakness. Finally, Anne Green returns to some of the issues McCulloch's paper raises in relation to policy, noting the tendency of residents of poor neighbourhoods who get employment to `move on up' and leave the area, hence helping to maintain the context. McCulloch replies to his critiques above by agreeing with many points they make but pointing out that: ``The evidence presented in most analyses regarding local contextual effects is only circumstantial'' (page 1365). Having summarised the debate that follows, instead of providing you with a continuation of this polite academic discussion, I am going to use my remaining words to tell you of the substantive reason I thought it would be good to have this debate, and why whether you think place matters may depend mostly on which places you have been to, in your mind and on the ground. My argument here is very different from those which follow and begins with McCulloch's argument on the nature of circumstantial evidence. I believe that the extent to which you believe the findings of research of this kind depends as much on your own life experiences, as on what you have read as a student or academic, or on what you have found out if you are an active researcher. That is not to say that there is no right answer. Just that the right answer is contingent or `circumstantial'. To start, how might it feel to be described as being part of a weak `human resource base' [see current trends in `third way' economic geography (Plummer and Taylor, 2001)] or more bluntly: as sediment?: ``In turn, the uneven way in which processes of mobility and job creation operate leave behind an accumulating deposit of `sediment' (of persistent unemployment and of other individuals in a relatively weak competitive position) on the margins of the labour market each time the tide goes in and out'' (Green, page 1364). McCulloch concludes similarly: ``No policies now being considered by government hold any real promise of confronting these structural dimensions of disadvantage'' (page 1368). The importance of circumstance From the ages of six to eighteen I got to school on foot or bike through a subway. The subway ran under a large roundabout connecting what was then one of the main roads from London to Wales and the Midlands, to the Oxford ring road. (2) It connected the four estates divided by these dual carriageways. It was entered by steep sloping ramps, was damp, long, and usually very dark as the lighting was smashed. The walls were graffiti covered. Among the names of children I knew, or thought I knew, were nastier slogans. The National Front were strong at the time (2) Directions have also been anonymised somewhat.

3 How much does place matter? 1337 and appended a swastika to their two joined-up initials. Swastikas are easy to spray paint. Most importantly, however, to me, the subway was curved. You couldn't see who was inside when you were going down into it. Once inside you could not see who was round the corner. Only when coming up again to the surface could you see light. And it mattered who you bumped into, depending on where you were entering and exiting from, how old you were, how small you were, whether you were a boy or a girl, black or white. The roads divided a large council estate to the north, from the 1930s semidetached housing of my estate to the east, from the picturesque `urban village' to the south, and the mixed development of the west. The subway connected these four corners and was where children in the 1970s and 1980s met between these different worlds. Adults often preferred to risk crossing the dual carriageways. Each morning and evening what appeared to be thousands of men cycled four abreast from the council estate round the roundabout to work in a large car factory half a mile south. Mums with prams would walk their smallest children to schools in each direction from each direction, over the surface, crossing the roads. Older children and teenagers (and a few pensionersötoo slow for the roads) would go underground. There were half a dozen primary/junior schools and two middle schools. Which you went to said something about where your parents thought you were coming from and going to. Everyone I met in the subway ended up at the same secondary school at age thirteen. (3) But by then where they were going to next (how they would add to the sediment of society) was often largely decided. No child I knew from the large northern estate left the city after school and only a couple from the estates east and west left Oxford. The boys were some of the last to be employed by the factory in large numbers; the girls could have children or take a secretarial course (but not both). Both sexes went into `service' in the university, three miles into townöwaiting on academics and keeping tourists out of colleges, cleaning the buildings and rooms. Painting, decorating, building, and labouring appeared the only other main alternatives. The small number of children who stayed on at school after fifteen/sixteen mostly came from the southern and eastern estates. They took and largely failed A-levelsöit seemed to me lateröso that other peoples' children could be told how well they had done when they passed. The most common grades were Us and Fs followed by a few Es and Ds. Only a few of my contemporaries got a higher grade than this without help from a parent (in almost all cases a parent who was a teacher). But these children who failed A-levels or did poorly at age seventeen/eighteen largely avoided manual, servile, or casual work and went into town to work in estate agents, other shops, banks, and building societies. These children were at least immune from unemployment for a while, as the car factory began to close, the university started to save money by sacking its servants and cleaners, and the housing market collapse ended painting, decorating, and casual building for a while. However, the current rationalisation of the financial and retail sectors is beginning to bite. Other jobs have come, new housing has been built, and a science park has been established over part of the factory site. Why did I begin to learn that place mattered at age twelve? Because it was then that I began to notice who came into the subway from where and by which exit they left (in effect, where they lived and where they went to school). What happened to my neighbours six years later appeared, to me, to depend acutely on children's comings and goings in the subway earlier. You did not need to read for a geography degree to (3) Children going to private school did not use the subwayöi think they must have travelled by car.

4 1338 D Dorling learn that children's options in life are largely controlled and constrained by the places in which they grow up, the local expectations, resources, schools, job opportunities, child-care expectations, and housing opportunities. If you saw how the political posters coloured each quarter red, yellow, or blue with sometimes near uniformity in a streetöyou did not need to know there was a neighbourhood effect to voting and campaigning öneater even than the social geography. If you worked in education, the police, in health, or most obviously as an estate agentöyou knew that place mattered. If you got a kicking at age twelve because you came in from the wrong entrance of a subway, you learnt quickly that place matters. There were exceptions to the monotonous predictability of children's lives from their subway journeys öbut the very fact that these were pointed out illustrated their rarity: ``didn't he do well'', ``she let them down'', and so on. Why, then, if it is all so obvious do we endlessly debate `area effects'? Perhaps we were not all lucky enough to have such neatly laid out subways in our childhoods? More likely, I suspect, we have forgotten them, consciously or unconsciously. One thing academics have in common is that they tend to be good at passing exams. The temptation to put your success at exams down to personal ability or `being clever' is high. For men like me it might, for instance, make up for not being so good at football or fighting as a boy. Increasingly concentrate your solution of `higher achievers' as you move through academic careers, and the pages of a journal such as this becomes full of the self-supporting writing of the children who `did well' in this one area of life. We give marks to children or young adults ourselvesösupposedly to reward individual talent. We can begin to believe what we once knew was a mythöthat achievement is due to individual effort, not largely a product of environment. You are very likely to know the places where I grew up through having read at least one other person's very different description of them. Alongside cars from the factory and papers from the university, a third Oxford export has been its children's books. At least two of the most famous of children's authors lived long parts of their lives within a short distance of the roundabout which I later passed under twice a day for twelve years. To my mind all of these books are partly writing about how place mattered in one way or another. None of these writings was complimentary about particular parts of the city their authors lived in and particularly about the area I walked through and came from. I will list a few below, but before you read the list, think what messages about the importance of space were you told, did you read, or were read to you in childhood? Can you recognise them, from people writing about, or at least writing in, this one city and neighbourhood? When Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (alias Lewis Caroll), of Christ Church, Oxford wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (in 1865) there was obviously no roundabout, there was only farmland and a quarry where the estates are now. The Oxford meadows and farmlands were portrayed in some ways as a safe place to play (although there were many other dangers to children in Alice's Victorian world). Less than half a century later the second most famous children's book to be inspired by a Thames boat trip was published. Kenneth Grahame, wrote Wind in the Willows in The map in the book is based closely on Oxford itself and shows the stoats and weasels living towards where the roundabout now lies. Forty years on John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings in 1948 while living in Oxford. He lived in one of the four quarters described above from 1953 to In this children's tale the `world' map clearly reflects European wartime geography, but the description of the `shire' becoming corrupted reflects one view of the postwar estate building in this area (it appears in the third of the trilogy published in 1955). Finally, Clive Staples Lewis,

5 How much does place matter? 1339 another Oxford academic (although he commuted between weekends to Cambridge from 1955) wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in He lived in a house made famous through the film Shadowlands at the edge of another of the four quarters, a few hundred yards from the roundabout. His garden of small lakes, many trees, and the odd lamppost is now a nature reserve, although hidden from children growing up in the area. The children he described ruling over lesser species did not live in the houses his home overlooked. The parochial description I have given you above is of a place you have probably already been to in your imagination, it just looks a little different on the ground. So where are we now? For me, given my past and my places, I am unlikely ever to be impressed by an A-level grade on its own (or even a string of As)öto believe it is much more than a signpost to your street, school, and socialisation. I am unlikely to think that if you do not have a job it is because of your personal failing rather than the choices of the employers in your area, and what in turn affects them and your luck and status when you enter that market. I am unlikely to be convinced that people in Britain do not know these things themselvesöthat when they choose and are forced where to live they are not expressing their intimate knowledge that place matters. I am unlikely to read a book by someone who has lived in Oxford (many famous geographers included) and not to have read something into where precisely they lived in that city. I made my mind up a long time ago about geography. However, proving that place matters to the satisfaction of others is much more difficult. Finally, you might like to know what has happened to the subway. Around the time that the new M40 motorway was finishedöthrough an area of outstanding natural beauty (but thankfully taking the London traffic to Birmingham away from many of the children of east Oxford)öthe roundabout was reengineered. The subway was dug up and a new one builtöin which from every entrance you can see through to an exit. A lot of the graffiti has now gone. Thankfully the National Front have too; although there are few new jobs in the car factory for the white men to `defend' (but it is producing the new Mini car). To keep some pretence of olden days going, the university still hires a few younger, cheaper servants from the estates in preference to their more expensive parents (lower minimum wage regulations make under twenty-fives more attractive servants). Traffic lights and pedestrian crossings have been placed over the dual carriageways which so neatly divided the estates before. Some council houses have been bought, including even some of wartime pre-fabs (that I suspect Tolkien and C S Lewis despised). Despite many protests, a small council estate has been built in another of the quarters (very near to C S Lewis's old house). Many children are now taken to school by car. Almost no men cycle to work by the road any more. And soöall in allöthe lines of demarcation are more blurred and the connection between where you are and where you are going is now less clearöto me at least. But perhaps not to a twelve-year-old child growing up there today? On one of the walls of the subway in May 2001 some child has written (geographically correctly): good puppies this way lost puppies this way! Perhaps I grew up in a strange placeöbut if that is true, place obviously matters in terms of what might inspire (or condition) you. Circumstances matter. I did not ask the authors who follow to include any biographical material. That is not something you ask in polite academic society. But what I still wonder is whether where you are born, brought up, and now live affects how you measure and interpret the effects of where people are born, brought up, and live? I hope you enjoy the articles and response that

6 1340 D Dorling follow and are a little persuaded by this that there is a human as well as quantitative answer to the extent to which geography matters. (4) Acknowledgements. Thanks to Nick Phelps and Mary Shaw for comments on a draft of this, also to the authors of the responses for writing them so quickly, to Andrew McCulloch for the original paper, for agreeing to this debate, and for his response, and to Ron Johnston for refereeing the debate. References Caroll L, 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan, London) DeLillo D, 1998 Underworld (Picador, London) Grahame K, 1908 Wind in the Willows (Methuen, London) Lewis C S, 1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Geoffrey Bles, London) McCulloch A, 2001, ``Ward-level deprivation and individual social and economic outcomes in the British Household Panel Study'' Environment and Planning A ^ 684 Montaner C, 2001, ``Social capital, class and race political conflict and population health: implications of the `Bowling Alone' hypothesis for research, philosophy and health policy'' International Journal of Epidemiology in press Plummer P, Taylor M, 2001, ``Theories of local economic growth (part 2): model specification and empirical validation'' Environment and Planning A ^ 398 Putnam R D, 200 Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, New York) Tolkien J R R, 1948 The Lord of the Rings (George Allen and Unwin, London) Tolkein J R R, 1955 Return of the King (George Allen and Unwin, London) (4) As I was revising this introduction I came across a paper (Montaner, 2001) critiquing Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) thesis. Putnam's thesis suggests that a large part of current social malaise is the result of a decline in `social capital', in simplified quantitative terms that some `area effects' have decreased in their positive effects. A few of the respondents mention social and human capital. Montaner questions both Putnam's thesis and also the author's own upbringing as having affected the way Putnam thinks. When discussing area effects and area policy, who we are and where we came from matter: ``There is only a limited amount of cohesion (to which vast amounts of resources are devoted through the media, police, and the military) that working classes and subordinated racial/ ethnic groups will tolerate before engaging in political confrontation with owners and the dominant race or ethnic group. Thus the efforts of today's social scientists to present social capital models that claim otherwise will prove ultimately futile, as were those of 19th Century Durkheimions [sic]. The back cover of `Bowling Alone' shows a photograph that illustrates this idea. The photo presents a bowling team in the US circa The author is at the centre and with his glasses, higher stature and big, confident smile looks like the undisputed team leader. At his side appear two shorter white kids, without glasses, and barely smiling; at both edges of the group are two African American kids, shorter, staring at the camera, dead serious. Following the social conflict analysis presented here, and contrary to what Putnam would think, we might ask whether these African American kids would have preferred to be bowling by themselves'' (Montaner, 2001, last page).

7 Environment and Planning A 2001, volume 33, pages 1341 ^ 1344 Do we care about area effects? George Smith, Michael Noble, Gemma Wright Social Policy and Social Work, University of Oxford, Barnett House, Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2ER, England; Received 21 May 2001 Andrew McCulloch's (2001) paper on the relative contribution of neighbourhood and individual-level variables to individual-level outcomes, using a mix of British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and 1991 Census data, raises a large number of interesting questions. McCulloch's paper contains properly tentative and technical analysis, and draws attention to the difficulties of measuring any `area effects' given the nature of the variables available from the census. However, he concludes that, despite these possible data limitations at area and individual level, ``measurable characteristics of the neighbourhood add little to our ability to explain variations in outcomes, once a full range of individual and family-level variables had been included'' (page 681). McCulloch immediately concludes ``The policy implications of the results are unambiguous''ö that is, broadly not to support area-based initiatives (ABIs), if there are individually targeted alternative policies. He suggests that the growth of ABIs is based (probably) on the belief that ``there are substantial differences between the performance of areas... these differences are assumed to be attributable to the areas themselves, rather than to the achievements and background of the people within them'' (page 682). He therefore concludes on the basis of his evidence that, as there are limited or negligible area effects, the main rationale for government using ABIs is undercut. His argument assumes (1) that government employs ABIs to counter adverse `neighbourhood effects' and (2) that there are only limited neighbourhood effects beyond the accumulation of individual ones. While we could take up some of the data issues in McCulloch's analysis: What does he consider to be `an area effect'? Are the measures he uses to assess such effects the best available? Is the way the BHPS sample is distributed geographically best designed for identifying area effects? Are there problems in clearly distinguishing `areas effects' from individual, family, and other factors? McCulloch has himself raised queries in these areas in his analysis. So it is the `unambiguous' policy implications we focus on. Here the analysis is on much shakier ground, focusing as it does on the apparently straightforward link between area effects and area policies. This is of course a long-running debateöcertainlylonger than the decade suggested by McCulloch. Indeed, the current argument by Mark Kleinman (1999) and others has strong echoes of the debate in the mid-1970s querying the apparent focus on area-based polices adopted under the Labour and Conservative administrations of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The main thrust of these critiques was the problem of missed targets if deprivation was simply attacked on an area basis (Barnes and Lucas, 1975), on the grounds that such deprivation was not neatly clustered on the map and that the majority of deprived individuals and families did not live in the most deprived areas. However, it is important to recall that this phase of area-based programmes (Educational Priority Areas, Community Development Projects, etc) was largely presented as an innovative complement to individual-based approaches for areas that had somehow missed out in the general spread of affluence. Later in the 1970s these same programmes were attacked, sometimes by those directly involved, on the ground that they were too individualistic and not structural enough in their approach to the causes of poverty and deprivation (for example, Townsend, 1979). The argument about inefficiency of targeting probably contributed to the demise of these programmes, but

8 1342 G Smith, M Noble, G Wright not unfortunately to a swing towards more effective individual policies for poor families or individuals or better structural or macroeconomic polices. Within a few years we were back to policies that took little interest in deprivation in either individual or area-based form. Individual level policies/mainstream policies versus ABIs We suspect that the present wave of area-based programmes probably comes from a similar dispositionöthat is, ABIs are not necessarily presented as an alternative, but a complement or supplement to mainstream and/or individual level programmes. We would concur with this approach. To argue that there is a rationale for area-based initiatives is not to argue that poverty should only be tackled using this kind of geographical targeting nor does it imply that ABIs are necessarily the most effective way of combating poverty. It is quite consistent to hold a view that the main policy prescription for the eradication of poverty should be through universal macroeconomic and social policies but still to see area-based policies as a useful addition to mainstream programmes. In practice, though the resources going into area-based programmes have increased, this is still dwarfed by the bulk of public funding that largely goes to individual households through the benefit system (Bramley et al, 1998). We would certainly argue that mainstream funding should be very substantially increased (for example, an increase to social security benefits to bring them up to adequate levels) and that there should be structural interventions to increase opportunities. Moreover, `area targeting' of policies does not necessarily imply a more general belief in targeted policies. In other words, selectivity at an area level does not mean subscribing to selectivity in mainstream services. In fact, one rationale for area-based initiatives is that they can be universal within an area and hence nonstigmatising to the individuals who will benefit, though `area stigmatisation' or labeling remains a real issue. Do ABIs inefficiently target deprived people? ABIs, it has been argued, are not appropriate means for tackling deprivation as there are more deprived people living outside such areas and thus ABIs are poor targeting instruments. Poor people are undoubtedly spatially concentrated. An area distribution of spatial units (even controlling for population variation) is skewed and shows a long tail of areas where `deprivation', however measured, is extreme. In the case of children `in poverty', defined rather narrowly as those living in families in receipt of Income Support or Income Based Job Seekers Allowance, if you use electoral wards as a proxy for neighbourhood and divide the wards in England and Wales into quintiles, the wards in the top quintile contain 58% of the poor children but only 33% of all children. There is therefore a significant spatial concentration of poor children in 1860 out of the total of 9300 wards in England and Wales. At local authority district level 81 out of the 408 districts in England and Wales contain half of all poor children on this measure. Why do we have spatial concentrations of deprived people? It is not simply the result of increased individual problems, but of structural changes in the employment and housing markets, coupled with some extraordinary housing allocation and dispersal policies that result in, for example, some of the South Coast seaside resorts having some of the highest levels of deprivation as a result of transfers of unemployed or other families from London. Our response is that this is a structural feature rather than an individual problem, and should be handled by removing the problem at source (reforming such allocation policies) or if these policies seemed the best available solution, then introducing some area-based remediation.

9 Do we care about area effects? 1343 There is, sadly, considerable stability in some deprived areas, which seems relatively insensitive to measurement technique. Some areas, such as Liverpool Vauxhall, which were identified as `deprived' in the first half of the 19th century are not doing relatively very much better in the 21st. The fortunes of other areas have changed. Why? If mainstream policies are the only answer, why is it that some areas are more resistant to improvement than others? For example, despite a general improvement in the economy in Britain between 1995 and 1998, there was considerable geographical variation in the extent to which income deprivation, measured as the rate of claim of Income Support/Income Based Job Seekers Allowance, had reduced (Noble et al, forthcoming). Such variation was apparent even at ward level. This is in part because areas with low numbers of unemployed people but high numbers of pensioners and/or lone parents, improved much less than areas where the claimants consisted mainly of unemployed people. Furthermore, unemployment in some areas such as the North East and Merseyside was slower to fall than elsewhere. Could this be described as an `area effect'? And there are macroeconomic features that play themselves out acutely at a very local levelöconsider a total pit closure in a mining village where miners previously bought their houses from the local authority or National Coal Board, or the equivalent situation recently faced by communities dependent on the steel works at Llanwern in Wales. House values, and therefore the capacity to move elsewhere, are constrained by a whole range of reasons. ABIs for locally delivered policies There are certain policies that have, by their nature, to be area based, rather than directed at an individual level. Indeed, in some cases there is, inevitably, some ambiguity. Is education an area-based or an individually targeted policy? Though schools have less distinct catchment areas than in the past they still tend to draw pupils from a defined locality. Remedial education may be individually targeted but it is not clear that this is necessarily better than a general programme of improving education in an area and there is quite robust information about `school effects' and more contentiously so-called `contextual effects' öthat peer-group and other factors are important in determining educational outcomes. Are `school effects' or `peer-group effects' not examples of `area effects', where as a result of the right sort of data and analysis, we have reasonably robust evidence of their impact on pupil progress? When it comes to child care and targeted health provision such as that in the Sure Start package, it is not clear how such polices could be delivered at an individual level and not targeted at an area level in some way. Quite apart from the question of motivation and stigma associated with such individually targeted provision, there would be access and travel issues. Moreover, research has shown that individually targeted provision such as traditional local authority day nurseries which explicitly cater for disadvantaged young children have been among the least effective forms of provision in promoting long-term development (for example, Sylva, 1994). Area effects? We remain unclear whether there are `area effects'. `Area effects' suggest that there is more going on in an area than simply the concentration of poor people. It may mean that the simple fact of concentration produces some further or compounding disadvantage. We would certainly support further research to investigate their existence. Certainly we would want better measurements of the appropriate neighbourhood factors than is provided by the decennial Census of Population. Longitudinal data must surely be the answer, but we would argue that there may need to be more concentrated sampling on an area basis than is the case with the BHPS, where there

10 1344 G Smith, M Noble, G Wright are clearly only limited numbers of cases in any ward. Better data may be around the corner. The move in the Millennium Cohort Study to focus samples in particular areas should help. In conclusion, there can be no doubt that poor people are concentrated spatially and that over time some areas improve, while others seem resistant to change. Mainstream policies must be the first line in raising people out of poverty, but for people living in areas which lag behind when there are economic upturns an ABI may well be an appropriate policy response. Of course, ABIs need to be appropriately assigned to deprived areas, and rigorously evaluated to provide an evidence base for successful area interventions. But do we need evidence that area effects actually exist to justify ABIs? Our conclusion is that we do not. References Barnes J H, Lucas H, 1975, ``Positive discrimination in education: individuals, groups and institutions'', in Educational Priority Volume 3: Curriculum Innovation in London's EPA's Ed. J H Barnes (HMSO, London) pp 237 ^ 279 Bramley G, Evans M, Atkins J, 1998, ``Where does public spending go? Pilot study to analyse the flows of public expenditure into local areas'', Department of the Environment,Transport and the Regions, Eland House, Bressenden Place, London SW1E 5DU Kleinman M, 1999, ``There goes the neighbourhood: area policies and social exclusion'' New Economy ^ 192 McCulloch A, 2001, ``Ward-level deprivation and individual social and economic outcomes in the British Household Panel Survey'' Environment and Planning A ^ 684 Noble M, Evans M, Dibben C, Smith G, 2001, ``Changing fortunes? Geographic patterns of income deprivation in the late 1990s'', Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions, Eland House, Bressenden Place, London SW1E 5DU Sylva K, 1994, ``The impact of early learning on children's later development'', in Start Right: The Importance of Early Learning Ed. C Ball (Royal Society of Arts, London) pp 84 ^ 96 Townsend P, 1979 Poverty in the United Kingdom (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middx)

11 Environment and Planning A 2001, volume 33, pages 1345 ^ 1348 Evidence-based policy and practice Roger Burrows, Jonathan Bradshaw Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, England; Received 21 May 2001 Given the current stress on the need for the development of ``evidence-based policy and practice'' in Britain (Davies et al, 2000), one might imagine that the recent emphasis on putting `neighbourhood' at the centre of policy-thinking (Maclennan, 2000) would have been informed by a systematic consideration of previous evaluations of the efficacy, or otherwise, of different forms of neighbourhood intervention. Certainly it is the case that neighbourhood-based approaches to tackling poverty and social exclusion in the United Kingdom are not new. The New Deal for Communities, the formation of Employment Zones, Education Action Zones, and Health Action Zones, all have a long lineage in the development of British urban policy. An exhaustive list of such policies would take up most of our 2000 words but would certainly include: Educational Priority Areas, Community Development Projects, Comprehensive Community Programmes, Inner Area Partnerships, Enterprise Zones, the Urban Development Corporations, Garden Festivals, City Action Teams, Urban Regeneration Grants, City Challenge, the Urban Partnership Fund, the Urban Regeneration Agency, City Pride, and the Single Regeneration Budget (Pacione, 1997). However, the truth is that despite the myriad of neighbourhood-based policy initiatives which have taken place (not to mention the billions of pounds spent on them) there is little in the way of reliable evidence on the efficacy, or otherwise, of area-based approaches to the alleviation of poverty and associated detrimental outcomes. The reasons for this are both methodological and political. At the level of methodology the tradition in the United Kingdom has been to focus on national-level survey data which take individuals and households as the main units of analysis rather than neighbourhoods. This tradition has been coupled with anotheröa focus on cross-sectional designs rather than on (more costly and more complex) longitudinal studies which would be able to decipher how neighbourhoods have changed over time. This combination has inevitably led to analyses which focus upon individuals and households at one point in time rather than on understanding the articulation of individuals and households within a broader set of local contextual processes and how these change over time. When neighbourhoods have been studied the analytic focus has tended to be on poor places in and of themselves rather than on neighbourhood dynamics in general. This is a major problem because it is often issues of propinquity which are crucial. The intersection of housing markets, schools, environmental factors, transport, the location of particular private and public services, employment opportunities, and so on mean that the fortunes of particular neighbourhoods are as much to do with actions (or inactions) of rich people as they are to do with the actions (or inactions) of poor people. At a political level these methodological problems have contributed to two major failings. First, the evaluations of neighbourhood interventions which have taken place have often been ill timed. The short-term political imperatives of demonstrating what has been done and, crucially, of promoting the spectacle of the intervention has often led to evaluations which are overly concerned with matters of process and short-term aims and objectives. Longer term evaluations of the success or otherwise of particular neighbourhood interventions have not taken place. Do we know how neighbourhoods subject to different kinds of intervention over the years have fared in the medium to long term? An examination of various indices of small area deprivation suggests that

12 1346 R Burrows, J Bradshaw poor places have tended to stay poor and that rich places have tended to stay rich over quite long periods of time. Certainly we have no overwhelmingly robust evidence which would lead one to automatically argue the case for the efficacy of neighbourhood-based interventions. The second political problemöand this despite the mantra of `what counts is what works'öis that, without any tradition of systematic reviewing, meta-analysis, or any clearly articulated hierarchy of research evidence within neighbourhood research in the United Kingdom, it has become possible for one or two studies to gain a disproportionate amount of political influence. The work of Alice Coleman (1985) on urban design is perhaps the best known example of this happening under the influence of the New Right, but under New Labour the recent work of Ann Power (for example, Power and Mumford, 1999) öalthough certainly not without valueöis perhaps the best example of how work based upon a particular standpoint, using a limited range of methods, and carried out within a number of specific contexts can be subject to gross overgeneralisation. Without a broader evidence base it becomes too easy to claim that one has been able to identify general trends on the basis of limited, local, and often qualitative studies. We certainly need work like that undertaken by Power and her colleagues, but it needs to feed into a much wider set of studies. (1) It was thus within this context that we came to read the paper by McCulloch (2001) which claims to be able to demonstrate that we should be ``inclined to limit neighbourhood-level interventions wherever one could as readily... realise macroeconomic, household-level, or individual-level interventions'' (pages 681 ^ 682). Now this is a conclusion with which we both have a strong intuitive political sympathy. However, it is also a claim which is made far too strongly on the basis of the analysis presented. This is not to say that the paper does not possesses a number of strengths. First, it shows a keen awareness of a wide range of existing research work within this area and is keen to demonstrate how it articulates with existing knowledge. Second, the British Household Panel Survey is a rich source of data which, although focused on changes across a representative sample of individuals and households rather than neighbourhoods, does have the great advantage of allowing one to track changes over time. Third, the paper represents yet another application of multilevel modeling techniques in the social sciences and, as such, it should be welcomed as a brave analytic attempt to begin the difficult task of disentangling the influence of individual and contextual effectsöan agenda which has had so much influence in developing understandings of social processes in educational, criminological, and health research over the last decade. However, we also have a number of concerns about the analysis which would lead us to be far more circumspect about the policy conclusions being drawn. The paper is reflexive and recognises many of the methodological limitations of the analysis presented. However, some of these limitations are forgotten when it comes to policy prescriptions. At the level of methodology we have a number of concerns, some of which raise perhaps more fundamental philosophical issues. We summarise some of these concerns in what follows. First, we are concerned about the use of the Townsend index as a measure of small area deprivation. All of the four variables in it are characteristics of the individuals and households in an area and as such they do not tell us much about the area per seöthe influence of neighbourhood on individual outcomes surely has more to it than the aggregated characteristics of the population that lives within it. The influence of place on individual outcomes is a far more subtle function of, inter alia, the physical and built environment, the location of services and facilities (both goodötoddler drop in (1) Many of the issues identified here are currently being tackled head on by Ade Kearns and Ray Forrest in the establishment of the new ESRC Neighbourhood Research Resource Centre (NRRC)öa node in the ESRC Evidence Based Policy Network.

13 Evidence-based policy and practice 1347 centresöand badöchemical factories), cultural images, and so on, as well as the people who live within an area. The new Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions Index of Multiple Deprivation developed by Noble and others at Oxfordöalthough by no means perfectöprovides a better, more up-to-date, and more genuine measure of area characteristics and it would be interesting to see the analysis repeated using this. It would also be interesting to experiment with other classifications of localities such as the Office for National Statistics classification of wards or the ACORN classification. Second, the multilevel modeling framework used here relates together just individual and area-level characteristics without any consideration of the mediating influence of the more proximate social influence of the households within which individuals are also nested.variation in household type is included as an individual-level control but it would have been interesting to see if the results differed within a model specification with three levels: individual, household, and neighbourhood. Relatedly, there is also some confusion in our minds about the specification of some of the models more generally. In particular, it is not always clear what are individual characteristics, what are area characteristics, and what are outcome measures. For example, unemployment appears in all three! Surely with this degree of overlap it is almost inevitable that much of the variation will be picked up at the individual level leaving nothing at the area level or vice versa? Third, the nature of neighbourhood effects, may well be highly contingent upon the outcome measure one examines. In particular, outcomes which can be more readily influenced by sociocultural factors, over and above those which emerge from the characteristics of local populations and/or spatial variations in social policy, are more likely to possess significant neighbourhood effects than are any of the outcome measures used in the paper. A good example of the sort of variation in outcome we are thinking of would be area variations in teenage conceptions and abortions in England. Ongoing work by Bradshaw suggests that there exists fantastic area variation in the propensity towards conception amongst females aged 15 ^ 19. Some of this variation can, of course, be accounted for by variations in deprivation at both individual and neighbourhood levels. However, significant outliers remain which appear to be associated with the spatial factors not picked up by deprivation measuresöfactors such as the location of young men in army camps and cultural practices which have resulted from a long social history of particular types of work. These real `locality' influences also seem to interact in complex ways with the real contingencies of policy implementation at a local levelöfor example, variations in sex education and/or the accessibility of contraceptive advice and/or abortion services. Fourth, wards are not neighbourhoods. This is explicitly recognised in the paper but then largely ignored. Neighbourhoods, if they have an influence on individual outcomes, are, in general, far more proximate spatial entities. Not only are wards too big they are not, in general, the focus of any neighbourhood policies. But perhaps there is a more general issue here which relates to the immense conceptual and operational fuzziness of the notion of a neighbourhood. Neighbourhoods are, to use the argot of realist approaches to the social sciences (Sayer, 1984, pages 126 ^ 127), inherently chaotic concepts in that they possess a disparate and varying range of causal powers deriving from the mix of real objects and relations which constitute them. This might be analytically acceptable at a descriptive level but is highly problematic within statistical modeling exercises which attribute unitary causal powers or liabilities to such entities. The analytic and policy questions that McCulloch has asked are very important ones. However, if we are to take the rhetoric of evidence-based policy at all seriously in

15 Environment and Planning A 2001, volume 33, pages 1349 ^ 1352 Is there a place for area-based initiatives? Heather Joshi Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Room 690, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, England; Received 21 May 2001 A quarter of a century ago, policymakers embraced a number of policy initiatives which situated interventions in so-called `areas of deprivation'. At the same time there was little action to prevent the widening of inequalities across individuals. In those days there was little other than ecological data linking indicators of poverty and other adverse outcomes, often given the portmanteau label of `deprivation'. The poor outcomes and the poor resources clustered in `poor places', but one could not be sure that they were correlated in individuals. It was little understood whether the targeting of `black spots' would reach those in most intense need or cut out particularly noxious points of `social infection'. There was speculation about adverse properties of the environments. The missing mechanism might be poor physical environment (`miasma'), a depressed local economy, or something in the social environmentöcrime, poor government, poor services, low morale, for example. Because these problems were thought to inhere in the locality, they implied targeting remedies on the place, rather than on the individuals, whose multiple deprivation might be fallaciously inferred from the area-based data. The debate continues into the 21st century, though there is now rather more evidence available to the policymaker, as well as a greater government commitment to tackle poverty at both national and local levels. Andrew McCulloch's (2001) study leads him to advocate putting priority on people rather than on places. He cites a number of regression analyses where individual-level data are included with communitylevel data as predictors of health or deprivation and the individual effects are found to dominate, as in his own results. For further references using the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study see Joshi et al (2000). The statistical power of warddeprivation indices is generally more or less swamped by similar information measured at the individual level. Does this lead to the conclusion that area-based policy is inappropriate, because these area effects are negligible? Sources of contextual influence Whether there may be independent influences at the `area' level, once allowance is made for individual factors, depends on several things. As shown in McCulloch's paper, it depends on the outcome under consideration. It may also vary according to the definition of the locality, area, or district under consideration. For different individuals different sets of boundaries may be relevant. Another factor is the duration of residence in a particular locality and the stability of its disadvantaging characteristics (Sloggett and Joshi, 1998a). The social composition of an area would itself have an effect over and above that of individual characteristics if the disadvantages of individual adversity were compounded by the proximity of others with the same characteristics. There is a greater chance of finding a link between area-level predictors and individual outcomes if the variables measured at the area level are more than mere aggregations of the same variables on individual characteristics in the model. Features of the natural or built environment, climate, pollution, accessibility of shops or services, or crime rates would be examples of conditions shared by all inhabitants, rather than social class, unemployment, or overcrowding, which would initially be measured at the level of the individual person or household. Failure to find (much) association between census indicators of local deprivation and adverse outcomes does not mean there is no influence of more truly contextual

16 1350 HJoshi community-level variables which are not easily derivable from a source like the census (Macintyre et al, 1993). Thus, though such factors may indeed affect spatial patterns of disadvantage, they may not be easily detected and are seldom readily available as nationwide data. The multilevel framework adopted by McCulloch, and others (including Wiggins et al, forthcoming), captures otherwise unobservable area effects at each level into which the data are organised, and can reveal geographical variation not apparent in single-level models. Another methodological note is the blurred conceptual distinction between individual characteristics and those of the location. The unemployment, or occupation of an individual reflects, at least in part, the context of the local labour market, and conversely, participation in the community (as we measure it in survey data) is actually based on individuals. Once the important influences of social inequality at the individual and household level have been taken into account, what area effects have been found? Their low profile should not be read as complete absence. The champions of spatial phenomena will point to McCulloch's finding that whether a person dislikes their neighbourhood is significantly related to the ward-deprivation score, and also shows a significant effect on health status for women, and is on the verge of it for men. Although my previous work (Sloggett and Joshi, 1998b) is correctly cited as having found no significant wardlevel effects on mortality, I would not wish to deny having found some significant area-level variation in health and deprivation outcomes. At the ward level, these include: female mortality when one of two census years' deprivation score is included, (Sloggett and Joshi, 1998a), long-standing illness, birth weight, teenage motherhood, solely registered births (Sloggett and Joshi, 1998b), and current symptoms (see Joshi et al, 2000); and, in several studies of long-standing illness, area `effects' are found at district level as well (Wiggins et al, forthcoming). In all these findings, the coefficients were small, and the individual-level predictors remain dominant. One of the contextual forces not well specified in census data is social cohesion, or social capital, proxies for which were included in the clustered Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS, Joshi et al, 2000). Social capital appears to play a part in the explanation of ill health, but not to be a panacea. What makes area initiatives appropriate? Does the dominance of individual effects mean that area-based policies are redundant? They surely suggest that area-based initiatives cannot substitute for policies targeted on individuals. The question is how far can area-based interventions usefully complement an aspatial antipoverty or public health programme? The degree to which they can effectively or equitably complement individual-based policies like cash benefits depends upon a number of factors, discussed below. Concentration of the target group in the target areas The equity and `target efficiency' of relying solely on area-based interventions for a given problem would depend on how many of the clients were actually in the target areas. If all of them, and no one else were inside the areas, the universal and the localised policy would be identical. However, in our samples, and on the sorts of indicators we have been using, more than half (55% in 1981, 51% in 1991) the `deprived' (of homeownership and car access) lived outside the wards containing the most deprived fifth of the population. Of the low-income group in our HALS study 71% lived in the better-off four fifths of wards (Joshi et al, 2000). It is possible that for some problems (such as poor service provision, or flood damage of homes, for example) the problem might be contained within specified areas. Localised action would be more appropriate the more localised the problem.

17 Is there a place for area-based initiatives? 1351 Mobility The appropriateness of an area intervention is also affected by how long people remain in one place, and in the deprived states identified in a particular snapshot. Long-term deprivation is of greater concern than a transient state; likewise, long-term residence in deprived areas than high population turnover. In the latter case, an area-targeted programme would be delivering its benefits to a revolving set of people. If the revolving set all shared disadvantaging characteristics [or came from other deprived areas, as many seem to do (Sloggett and Joshi, 1998a)] this might not be self-defeating, and could be a way of spreading the benefits around, but if the intervention resulted in `gentrification', whereby better-off newcomers moved into the improved environment, displacing the original inhabitants without compensation, the policy could backfire. The site specificity of services Even if there is no underlying geographical origin to the pattern of disadvantage, some of the ways of redressing it involve local operations. A tax credit or a pension can be administered nationally, but child-care facilities, schools, hospitals, transport, and other public services are inherently located at the point of delivery. It may be argued that the implementation of these policies should involve prioritisation of locations according to criteria of local need. The general failure of the literature to find much intensification of individual health disadvantages in places where the deprived population congregates, does not mean deprived areas cannot be treated as `collecting points' of target clientele. But McCulloch's finding of a negative interaction of area and individual deprivation for women's health status [similar to one found by Sloggett and Joshi (1998b)], which suggests that for some outcomes it may be worse to be poor with affluent neighbours rather than other poor ones should sound a note of caution. Some alternative strategy needs to be in place to reach out to the less well off, `isolated' in more affluent areas. Economies of scale in clustered interventions Area-based initiatives may be efficient, though not equitable, if there are gains to the delivery of services in clusters, or if the operations need to exceed some critical mass to be effective. A good reason to expect an area-based initiative to reap economies of scale would be if it takes advantage of the possibilities of complementarity between different elements of the intervention, say on housing, education and employment. This may not be happening as much as might be thought, because different parts of Whitehall have launched their own Action Zones with different policy emphasis (Heath Action Zones and Education Action Zones, for example) in different places. To the extent that these initiatives coincide and are coordinated locally, this could be a justification for their existence. However to the extent that they are not, one might draw comfort from the fact that the net of area-based action is spread wider than it would be if all the initiatives were confined to the same places. The process may in the long run be more equitable if there is learning to be gained by starting in pilot areas, and implementation follows elsewhere. Though if the policies turn out to be replicable they would probably still be `area based', thus leaving the problems of people dispersed over less deprived sorts of habitat needing a different sort of attention. Community participation The harnessing of local community participation can be an important element of `area-based' initiatives. The policy is not just `top down', but mobilises energy and commitment at the `grass roots' and may realise beneficial externalities within the community (or possibly even reduce negative externalities with neighbouring communities, on the `black spot' theory). Community participation makes such policies

18 1352 HJoshi less easily replicable, but it also constitutes a good reason for focusing on particular places, particularly if community development as well as poverty prevention is an objective. Area-based policies in their place To take the example of health, Macintyre et al (1993) have argued that the reduction of health inequalities should involve action to improve individual health behaviour as well as improvements in the general structure of economic opportunities. They argue further that improvements in the health of the disadvantaged could not wait (or depend) on the latter. They argued that action, `on the ground' at the area level, was the way to ensure immediate progress. The argument made here, which largely reiterates McCulloch's, is that the overall distribution of income and opportunities is an essential determinant of many aspects of the quality of life, including health. Action in Areas makes much less sense without complementary action at the national level and coordinated at the local level. Policies towards Places are not redundant, but they should operate within a context of Policies towards People. References Joshi H, Wiggins R, Bartley B, Mitchell, R, Gleave S, Lynch K, 2000, ``Putting health inequalities on the map: does where you live matter, and why?'', in Understanding Health Inequalities Ed. H Graham (Open University Press, Milton Keynes) pp 143 ^ 155 McCulloch A, 2001, ``Ward-level deprivation and individual social and economic outcomes in the British Household Panel Study'' Environment and Planning A ^ 684 Macintyre S, MacIver S, Sooman A, 1993, ``Area, class, and health: should we be focussing on places or people?'' Journal of Social Policy ^ 234 Sloggett A, Joshi H, 1998a, ``Indicators of deprivation in people and places: longitudinal perspectives'' Environment and Planning A ^ 1076 Sloggett A, Joshi H, 1998b, ``Indicators of deprivation as predictors of life events'' Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 54(4) 228 ^ 233 Wiggins R, Joshi H, Bartley M, Gleave S, Lynch K, Cullis A, forthcoming, ``Place and personal circumstances in a multilevel account of women's long-term illness'' Social Science and Medicine

19 Environment and Planning A 2001, volume 33, pages 1353 ^ 1356 On reinvented wheels Charles Pattie Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S10 2TN, England; Received 21 May 2001 As I get older, so `cyclical' models of history come to seem ever more appealing. Amidst the on-rushing novelty, familiar themes and debates from the past reemerge. And here is another example. In his careful analysis of the impact of contextual effects on deprivation and social exclusion, Andrew McCulloch (2001) notes that area-based policies are currently in governmental vogue in the United Kingdom, and that ``behind these initiatives lies a decade-long debate over how effective area-based policies can actually be'' (page 667). But, in fact, he underestimates just how old the debate actually is. In fact, he has (inadvertently?) recapitulated/rediscovered a major policy debate of the late 1960s and 1970s: do area-based policies actually do what they are supposed to? Just as the Blair government's new-found enthusiasm for area-based initiatives echoes the initiatives of (especially) the Wilson and Heath governments, so McCulloch's sceptical discussion harks back to the criticisms voiced over quarter of a century ago. Consider... Plus c a change In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we were bombarded with a range of area-based initiatives aimed at the alleviation of poverty and disadvantage (Higgins et al, 1983). Early initiatives pathologised disadvantage, and emphasised the existence of, and need to break, `cycles of deprivation' operating within particular families and neighbourhoods. The 1967 Plowden Report resulted in Educational Priority Areas (EPAs). Reactions to Enoch Powell's infamous 1968 `rivers of blood' speech included the Urban Programme and the `action-research' Community Development Projects (CDPs). Careful concentration of resources in deprived neighbourhoods, it was felt, would lead to significant improvements in the lives of the most disadvantaged individuals and families, lifting them out of poverty without having to resort to some form of individual targeting (this at a time when memories of the 1930s and means testing were still fresh in the minds of both the public and policy elites). By the mid-1970s, however, there was growing criticism of the area-based approach. Critics pointed out that money spent on poorer areas often failed to reach the poorest individuals within those areas. Improving facilities in EPA schools, for instance, often seemed to give an advantage to children from relatively more affluent backgrounds in the locality, rather than (as intended) those from the most disadvantaged homes. Other critics (some from within government programmes, as in the case of the CDPs) argued that to tackle deprivation, it was necessary to tackle root causes, not just area manifestations. In any case, many (most?) `deprived' individuals and households did not live in designated `deprived' areas: targeting areas rather than people meant ignoring those outside the areas. Area-based policies, it was increasingly argued, were not necessarily the most effective way of reaching, and helping, those in greatest need.... plus c'est la meª me chose And, a quarter century later, here we are again! The New Deal for Communities, Employment Zones, Education Action Zones, Health Action Zones... it all sounds strangely familiar. And, not surprisingly, the same, sceptical, case can be made. To some extent, McCulloch makes it hereöthough he does not make mention of the (quite substantial) debates of the 1960s and 1970s. If only policymakers (and policy analysts?) had a sense of history...

20 1354 CPattie What now? Can the baby stay in the bath? McCulloch is quite right, therefore, to raise doubts about the appropriateness of area-based `solutions' to deprivation and social exclusion. To some extent we have been here beforeöand the past record is not encouraging. But does the combination of the past record and McCulloch's own, contemporary, research, suggest that areabased initiatives should be consigned to the social policy dustbin? I am not so sure. There are still several reasons for not (yet) throwing the area policy baby out with the (contextual effects) bathwater. Reason 1: political pragmatism We should not underestimate the symbolic impact of area-based policies in an areabased electoral system. Britain's first-past-the-post plurality electoral system, based as it is on winner-takes-all competitions in 659 separate constituencies, almost requires parties to think about the spatial consequences of their policies. To win power in Westminster, a party must win a plurality of the votes in a majority of the constituencies. Just being popular is not enough. You must be popular in the right places. And that may mean showing residents in those places that you have their interests at heart. As she returned, victorious, to Conservative Party headquarters in the small hours of election night, 1987, Mrs Thatcher told her cheering party workers not to forget `those inner cities' (see Robson, 1988). This was not a sudden discovery of society (no sentimentalist she!) Rather, it reflected the Conservatives' rather poor electoral showing in the major cities: despite success elsewhere, the party had lost seats in the major conurbations. A decade later, similar electoral considerations are likely to be circulating in the minds of Labour strategists. Labour traditionally does well in deprived communities. However, since the emergence of the `New Labour' project in 1994, with its emphasis on winning support from middle-class `middle England', there has been a growing concern that Labour's traditional supporters might become increasingly alienated from the party (Pattie, 2001). Symbolically, it would have been hard for New Labour in power not to implement policies that would be most visible in Labourvoting areas. How else would they counter the charge that they had neglected their heartlands? Nor should political pragmatism be knocked (at least, not too much) as a motive. In the British electoral system, winning is everything: parties out of office have no chance to put their plans into practice. If the cost of insufficient pragmatism is being out of office, then that is arguably too high a price to pay for politicians who genuinely want to make a difference to people's lives. Note by the way, that this is a form of contextual argument. It is based on a growing body of research which shows that voters take note of what is happening in their home areas when deciding how to vote (for example, Pattie and Johnston, 1995; Pattie et al, 1997). However, the important point of pragmatism is this. Whether or not there are contextual effects in deprivation and social exclusion is potentially irrelevant to voters' calculations regarding how their localities are faring. What matters is what they see around themöand investment on the ground in their areas may pay electoral dividends by convincing them things are going well, even if there is no underlying social process to justify area-based investment. In other words, the argument that ``concentrations of deprivation give rise to problems greater than the sum of its parts'' (McCulloch, 2001, page 667) is necessarily not ``the underlying rationale of area-based policies'' (page 667, emphasis added): it is only one of several different possible rationales. Reason 2: reaching the most (and the right?) people? Despite the relative weakness of the contextual case as outlined in McCulloch's paper, area-based policy might still be a sensible approach if the areas targeted contain most

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